How to Clean Up Your Gmail Storage in

The quickest way to clear your Gmail storage and get rid of "Gmail Storage Full Not Receiving Emails" errors

By Pat

Effective since 2021, Google enforces stricter storage limitations for Gmail. This means inactive accounts and those exceeding storage quotas risk deletion. To maintain access to emails and connected Google services, users are encouraged to manage their Gmail storage.

Your Gmail account gives you 15GB of storage space, like a suitcase for your digital stuff. This space is divided between Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos. However, the era of generous free Photos storage has ended. You're now left with no option but to roll up your sleeves and declutter. We're sure you don't want Google to take matters into its own hands and start tossing things out!

How to fix the "Gmail Storage Full" & "Gmail Out of Storage" errors?

Let's start our cleaning spree by looking at your Gmail inbox, especially those old emails.

Before we begin our deep cleaning, check your overall Google account storage usage on the Google One portal.

Once you've confirmed that Gmail is consuming a significant amount of storage space, we can explore two options for cleaning it up:

• Delete random emails in Gmail and hope they free up enough storage space.
• Use GoodByEmail, a specialized, privacy-first app that - with the help of a lot of algorithmic power - analyzes your inbox and identifies the "Top Offenders". These are the email senders that take up most inbox space. You can also unsubscribe from mailing-list senders with one-click directly from the app. GoodByEmail is the only truly private email cleaner on the market. Your emails never leave your device. There's no need to share your email login credentials or grant access to your inbox.

Option 1 — Deleting Random Emails

How to Quickly Delete Old Emails to Clean Up Gmail

It's time to start cleaning!

Gmail categorizes emails under different tabs: Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates, and Forums. Google thinks your Primary tab has the important stuff, and the rest may not be as important. But sometimes, those other tabs hold treasures old newsletters, forum updates, or old notifications from social networks. You know, the kind of stuff you want to hold on to (even if just to reminisce).

A commonly suggested approach is to start by deleting unnecessary emails from the Promotions tab. However, it can be difficult to know where to start without knowing how much space these emails are using. Promotions can be a good place to begin, as many of the emails there are likely to be of lesser importance.

If you want to avoid deleting emails randomly, you can use filters to organize your deletions.

How to Filter Emails to Selectively Clear Gmail Storage

You can use Gmail's search box to find specific types of emails. It's like being a detective! It can search for more than just words; it can look for certain things to help you find emails you don't need. Here are some handy commands you can use:

older_than:5m - This shows all emails older than five months. You can change 'm' to 'y' for year or 'd' for day.

before:02/14/2015 - This shows all emails sent before February 14, 2015.

filename:pdf - This shows all emails with a PDF file attached.

has:attachment - This finds all emails with attachments.

size: or larger: or smaller: - This can find big emails. For example, 'larger:200' will find emails bigger than 200 bytes, while 'larger:13M' will find those larger than 13 megabytes.

is:important - This shows all emails marked as Important.

from:Joanna - This finds all emails from Joanna.

label:Campaign-ABC - This finds all emails labeled "Campaign ABC".

Unfortunately, even after all this, you may still not know how much space you saved by deleting those emails. You may also end up deleting emails with large attachments that you really don't want to delete. This means that you may still receive the chilling notification that you are still out of storage space, even a day later.

This brings us to our second option, GoodByEmail, a tool that can genuinely help you reclaim your inbox space.

Option 2 — Using GoodByEmail

How to Mass Delete Emails to Quickly Clean Up Gmail

The problem with Gmail filtering is that it doesn't show you which senders are using up the most storage space.

Shockingly, you've been made believe that large attached files are the main cause of full inboxes. However, the reality is that a large number of small emails can also take up a lot of storage space.

But what if you could know who are the senders that really load up your inbox? GoodByEmail does the heavy number crunching on your inbox and helps you discover the Top Offenders that use up your Gmail storage, using a privacy-first approach (your data is protected and never leaves your device). Here's how it works in a nutshell:

Scan your Gmail inbox offline using GoodByEmail's privacy-first approach. No OAuth tokens required, and it even works offline! For further information on privacy considerations in email cleaning, check this article.

Learn how to fix "Gmail out of storage" errors quickly by identifying email senders that are using up the most storage space.

Unsubscribe & mass delete thousands of emails and clear up Gmail storage.

GoodByEmail's interactive dashboard let's you see who's REALLY taking up space, how many emails they've sent, and when they last emailed you. Some users report their top 10 offenders alone account for between 40-60% of their inbox clutter.

This list provides a powerful tool for inbox decluttering. This list is conveniently pre-sorted for you, showing all your senders ranked by the total storage space used by their emails. But you can also switch the sorting to show the number of emails received. No matter the sorting method, simply note down the senders you want to say goodbye to!

Additionally, with GoodByEmail, you can identify which of these senders are mailing list senders and easily unsubscribe from them, preventing unwanted emails from piling up in your inbox in the future.

With those notes at hand, let's start mass deleting our Top Offenders! Go back to Gmail and search for those senders.

Back in Gmail and ahead of anything, temporarily disable "Conversation view" to handle each email individually and ensure you'll be deleting emails only from the senders in your search query.

Go to Gmail settings by clicking the gear icon (top right corner), find "Conversation view", turn it off and click "Reload" to apply the changes.

This allows you to handle each email individually without them being grouped by thread.

Select their emails, then click the little checkbox icon at the top left. This will select the first page of emails from that sender, not all the emails from that sender. After you select the emails on the first page, and want to select all emails from that sender you can click the link "Select all conversations that match this search". You will then get the confirmation "All conversations in this search are selected."

You can now move on to deleting emails! Click the little trash-can icon to put all these emails in the trash. Once you confirm, poof! Those emails are gone… sort of.

Gmail has just moved your emails to the Trash folder. You can find your deleted emails in the Trash folder on the left side. Google kindly gives you 30 days to recover any email you didn't mean to delete. If you're sure, click the "Empty Trash now" message at the top of your Trash email list to get rid of those emails forever. But be careful, once they're gone, they're really gone!

After those emails are gone from your inbox and the Trash folder, wait a day for Gmail to update things. Then, you'll have a lot more storage space!

After cleaning your inbox, revert your Gmail settings by enabling Conversation View again. Go to Gmail Quick Settings (gear icon on the top right corner), find "Conversation view" and turn it back on.

With these helpful tips, you're on your way to a cleaner Gmail inbox. By not only deleting unnecessary emails, but also unsubscribing from unwanted mailing lists. Have fun cleaning!

Feeling a bit overwhelmed? Don't hesitate to reach out - we're happy to help!

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